The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  While steroid use has declined in the industry, or at least become less visible, the damage is still being felt; too many hearts have been broken, literally, by the regimen of human growth hormones, painkillers, cocaine, and grueling workouts, as the older generations of wrestlers continue to die at an appalling rate. McMahon evidently doesn’t see that, laughing at the notion that steroids are “deleterious to your health,” and going so far as to muse, “What is abuse of steroids? I don’t know what that is. No one can tell you what that is . . . You can abuse sugar or any other substance or any other drug.”

  Sugar. Maybe so. Perhaps Chris Benoit had merely indulged in too many sugary snacks. How else to explain the strange case of Benoit, other than the extreme, and natural, conclusion of McMahon’s three-decade war on the senses? On the very night Benoit was to be crowned ECW Champion by the WWE, a prize every wrestler tosses and turns at night dreaming about, the wrestler was running headlong into an inferno.

  Over the course of the weekend, he strangled his wife, Nancy, then drugged and suffocated Daniel, his seven-year-old son. He sent vague texts to a few fellow wrestlers, excuses about missed flights and food poisoning. After placing a Bible next to each corpse, Benoit hanged himself using the pulleys of his home gym, the weights, in death as in life, providing the ballast.

  The WWE’s reaction was to immediately declaim any responsibility for Benoit’s warped, murderous state of mind, and then to scrub him from wrestling history. This angle, in which pro wrestling had as much relationship to the bloodshed as an onlooker to a pileup, was flagrantly dishonest. Benoit was well known in the industry for taking hits from metal chairs to the back of the head, as well as for employing a particularly punishing diving headbutt move. The deadly effects of untreated concussions are now known to football fans—and yet your average NFL player suits up, at most, maybe 16 times a season. As Shoemaker notes, a wrestler does so perhaps 200 times a year.

  The result, as postmortem examination would show, was that at the time of his death, Benoit had the brain of an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s sufferer, with broad swaths of gray matter gone brown, indicating severe dementia. As if this were not enough, sports journalist Irv Muchnick notes that “Benoit’s system had been so messed up by decades of anabolic steroid abuse that he was no longer producing enough male hormones on his own, and was being prescribed off-the-charts quantities of injectable testosterone.” The horrific biological result of this, continues Muchnick, was that Benoit’s postmortem toxicological exam recorded 59 times the level of testosterone as would be found in a normal adult male.

  Nancy Benoit’s sister would later state the medical examiner had confided that “Chris was on his way to death within 10 months,” and that, like his late friend Eddie Guerrero, Benoit’s heart “was huge, about three times normal size, and it was ready to blow up at any moment.” This nightmarish physical specimen, a marriage of brain death and hormonal insanity, was once a wrestler.

  Still, even this, as violent an apotheosis imaginable, was not enough to meaningfully change the business. The government’s post-Benoit investigation of pro wrestling was derailed almost immediately, as McMahon and his Pupkinesque attorney, Jerry McDevitt, used their Capitol Hill invitation as an opportunity to testify about smiling, thespian talents, and Frank Deford’s bowling shoes.

  McMahon’s skillful, unrepentant evasion of federal oversight is nothing new; it’s as much a part of wrestling as the suplex or Irish whip. A 1957 column by Dan Parker, following a toothless, unenforced Justice Department consent agreement with the NWA, rings as true today as it did then: wrestling promotion is a confederacy of sleaze, and will remain that way until its demise:

  The squareheads of the wrestling racket, whose brains tick like bombs when they meditate, ruminate or even mediate, as they did in this case, tacitly admitted their guilt when the Dept. of Justice accused them of operating a combination in restraint of trade by offering no defense . . . Using such weapons as the boycott, the blacklist and coercion, they bottled up the wrestling business for themselves, along with the television rights and control of the champions they made and unmade.

  Even when the babyface prevails, the bad guy still wins.

  Finishing Moves

  The more afraid a wrestler is of his future, of his place in the sun, the more money a promoter makes. A wrestler enters the ring, to music, to a huge pop, to jeers. He wrestles, he struggles, he sells, he wins, he loses, clean in the middle—he does it again, and again—and then, someday, he doesn’t, because he’s dead. The heat a good wrestler can draw, working a crowd, only makes the silence that much more deafening.

  It is hard to think of a laborer—outside of, perhaps, the sex industry—who better exhibits this rotten duality, of desirability and disposability, of being “warmly welcomed, always turned away,” than a wrestler. It is no coincidence that the romance at the center of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is between an aging wrestler and an aging stripper—each is “the truest representation of the wage-worker as portrayed by Marx”:

  Both Randy and Cassidy live on the fringes of society: they are employed in sectors which are regularly mocked and derided, and their personal lives, much like their physical bodies, are ravaged by scars . . . They have no means of income, no means of survival, nothing to sell but their bodies and the labor these bodies can produce. And so they sell them, for decades, and when their bodies are exhausted they are left in poverty.

  Throughout history, pro wrestlers have been largely unable to bargain for their compensation or type of work; with no guaranteed income, of the sort generated by an equitable contract or official employment, most wrestlers have been happy to take what they can get. They are not alone, as almost any wrestling fan will already know, from the thousand cuts of daily life in a fugitive economy. Flux has been the name of the game for promoters, maximizing profits by keeping their labor market anxious, the wrestlers peripatetic, the next payoff uncertain. You may be swapped in if you’re lucky, but when spent, you’ll be swapped out.

  The story of pro wrestling in the 20th century is the story of American capitalism, filtered through a dreamy aspect, of gallant grapplers, of mustache-twirlers, of princesses and salt-throwers and masked spoilers. Kayfabe is a slinky thing, in what it masks: it’s sheer enough to let us marks in on some of the fun, yet supple enough to obscure most of the human cost.

  Ever since Frank Gotch defeated George “The Russian Lion” Hackenschmidt before 25,000 spectators, amid the Chicago stockyards and slaughterhouses, in a match that grossed $87,000 at the gate—in 1911—pro wrestling has been too lucrative for promoters to be fair to its labor. The official organs of the wrestling industry served like a particularly bruising temp agency, with no permanent employees, no solid ground to stand on—just badly paid tumbleweeds in tights, drinking beer and eating baloney sandwiches on an endless, meandering journey into the next turnbuckle.

  They kept men in fear, of one another, and of what life had to offer. For all their physical expertise and technical repertoires, wrestlers could not contest their own fates.

  “Every man’s heart one day beats its final beat,” snarled Ultimate Warrior on Monday Night Raw in April, in a valedictory warm-up for his WWE Hall of Fame induction that same week. “His lungs breathe their final breath and if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit will be immortalized.”

  A day later, at age 54, Jim “Ultimate Warrior” Hellwig was dead—a sudden, fatal heart attack of the sort which claims the lives of so many wrestlers in middle age. His speech was rendered weirdly haunting, speaking as it did for so many others. Hopefully, a career spent wrestling does resolve itself into something transcendent, and larger than life; life is not a commodity much apportioned to wrestlers.

  “I’m telling you,” confessed five-time NWA heavyweight champion Wahoo McDaniel in the last years of his life, as recorded by Shoemaker. “There�
��s so many of them gone and died. A lot of my buddies have died . . . I don’t know what it is.”

  Gone, gone, gone. They take to the wings and disappear.

  Gorgeous George, the first celebrity heel, drank himself to death at age 48, inhabiting the lowlight of a chicken farm. The mighty Andre the Giant was dead at 46, the strain of his gigantism too much for his heart. Road Warrior Hawk, Bam Bam Gordy, and Ray “Big Boss Man” Traylor, all noted heavies, all too died of heart attacks, all in their forties.

  The fatal drug overdoses, too many to count—Brian Pillman, Brian “Crush” Adams, “Ravishing” Rick Rude, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, Louie Spicolli. Three of the Von Erich brothers killed themselves; a fourth, the star, David Von Erich, overdosed at the tender age of 25. “Macho Man” Randy Savage, and his lovely consort, the alluring Miss Elizabeth, are both dead; Miss Elizabeth’s last boyfriend, Lex Luger, is partially paralyzed from a stroke. Dino Bravo was shot dead while watching hockey; his murder has never been solved. Chris Kanyon, the first WWE wrestler to come out as gay, sued McMahon over the “independent contractor” scam, fell out of work, and, suffering from bipolar depression, killed himself. Junkyard Dog fell asleep driving and crashed. Eddie Guerrero died of a heart attack at 38, so wracked by pain in his final bouts that he could barely wrestle. The list doesn’t end.

  Pro wrestling puts over its servants in ways they couldn’t have imagined, but it seems like every pop is followed by a bump. Even the ringside talent isn’t immune. Everyone pays a price. Legendary announcer Bobby “The Brain” Heenan was a master of pomposity, a half-clever buffoon, whose angle as an absurdly grandiose, quick-witted weasel produced genuinely funny comedy. Heenan’s antics—wailing in Andre the Giant’s grip, hissing at the Hart family—was everything joyous about wrestling, a kinetic comedy of manners, in which the collision of two human beings could, for a few moments, take on some sort of grand dimension.

  And now, Heenan cannot speak, robbed of his gift by throat cancer, his talents revoked before he dies. It’s unfair, and it’s maddening. The frustration with it all, with all the damage and waste and graft, brings to mind Heenan’s sputtering objection when he was ostensibly fired on TV by wrestler Paul Orndorff. Unlike most discarded wrestling luminaries, Bobby fought back, jabbing his finger and standing on his toes: “I am a man of dignity! I am a man who deserves respect!”

  It would be a good line to rally the misbegotten wrestlers, a battle cry for the real bout they need to contest. But then, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan was a comic heel. In pro wrestling, it’s always been understood: dignity is strictly for punch lines.

  Many thanks to Tom Keiser, Bill Hanstock, and David Shoemaker for their invaluable assistance.

  RICK BASS

  The Rage of the Squat King

  FROM NEW NOWHERE

  “I can’t feel anything, I can’t see anything—and yet I must feel and see everything, at the same time.”

  WHEN I WAS a young man in college, and a competitive weightlifter, there was a man we revered greatly, who was the world’s strongest squatter. The squat is a lift that combines, I think, brute strength in equal measure with technique.

  In the squat, you place the bar, loaded with its ponderous weight, across your back. You lift it up out of a rack and take one and a half or two steps backwards. You wear a thick leather belt cinched tight around your belly to keep your intestines from blowing out under all the pressure, and you wrap your knees tightly with elastic bandages to keep the somewhat fragile, intricate arrangement of ligaments, tendons, and cartilage from uncoiling, snapping, and spraying out everywhere like the broken springs from a Swiss watch—but that’s all the support you get. Other than that, you’re on your own.

  You sink down into a crouch, with that weight on your back. It’s heavy. It tries to keep driving you down, all the way down.

  My lifter friends and I would occasionally see the champion of this lift, Fred Hatfield, aka “Dr. Squat,” perform his greatness on television, on obscure Saturday afternoon sports specials.

  He would snort and do this odd little shuffle-step, and then rush out to the bar that rested waiting for him in the squat rack. He’d be howling and huffing and puffing, rolling his eyes and his head like a Chinese dragon.

  He would run up to the bar and grab it and shake it, get under it and maneuver his back beneath it, wriggling himself into position—not unlike someone taking pleasure in his lover’s embrace—and then he would lift the weights free of the rack and back out with the horrible weights draped across his back, the iron bar bending and bouncing, there was so much weight on it. He would plant his feet, look skyward, huff twice more, a third time, and then he would go down.

  His mouth would open in a groan as he sank, and his eyes would roll and bulge as if about to pop. Veins would explode into view everywhere, veins not just in his arms and legs and shoulders, chest and neck, but in his face, in his hands, across his nose, everywhere, with his face turning red and then purple, and his knees and elbows quivering.

  And then the weight would begin going back up—being driven slowly, infinitesimally, upward again.

  Twenty years later, I decided to track him down—to see if he was still squatting. I visited him at the headquarters of the World Wrestling Federation, in Stamford, Connecticut, where he had taken a job training the wrestlers how to get bigger and stronger.

  When I enter his office, my first thought is how very much he seems not to belong in this place, this building, with its well-dressed executives walking down the silent carpeted hallways. He’s dressed in a white sweat suit and tennis shoes, a red T-shirt, and wears a blazing pink baseball cap with the words SIMPLY THE BEST on it, and he looks trim, almost nautical. He’s neither tall nor short, nor is he really either heavy or light.

  We walk past office after office of accountants and public relations folks—so many pale, skinny, young white men, all the same age, and all slightly skittish as we pass, and all seeming to fail to exude—is it presumptuous to say this?—any semblance of spirit whatsoever.

  “The pencil-necks,” Hatfield mutters under his breath. He shakes his head. “Let’s just say I don’t have very much corporate acumen,” he says. He’s rolling off the balls of his feet, rising up on his toes with each step, and maybe it’s just that the gearing of his body is all wrong for him to be walking without any burden.

  In his office, he has a computer perched before him, a big one, such as you might use to pilot an airliner. He prints out his résumé, or rather a 20-page partial résumé, for me—and though it would be interesting were it someone else’s—a kind of a caricature of some kind of superman—I scan it somewhat impatiently.

  Gymnastics champion, soccer champion, author of 60 books, strength consultant to world-class athletes such as Evander Holyfield and Hakeem Olajuwon, schooled in Naval Communications, Pensacola, Florida, for top-secret and crypto-clearance with the Office of Naval Intelligence . . . taught statistics at Newark Stone College, 1972–1973 . . . computer programmer for Pratt and Whitney Aircraft, enlisted as U.S. Marine Corps decathlete, cross-country . . .

  “Did you ever have the feeling that this lift—the squat—was designed perfectly for your body—that you had the perfect leverage and musculature for it?”

  Hatfield doesn’t really bristle, but I’ve touched some nerve, way down there. “Everybody thinks I excelled because of a God-given gift,” he says, his voice a bit thick with emotion. “Obviously, I had the genetics. But my genetics alone weren’t enough to get me beyond a certain level.” He shrugs. “I spent several years squatting around only 550 pounds.

  “I was wallowing in mediocrity,” Hatfield says. “And I decided: Hey, enough is enough. I’m going to develop my own science.”

  He punches away on the computer, drawing up data.

  “I began the arduous task of categorizing all the various factors that could affect strength,” says Hatfield. “I fashioned a working definition of strength as ability to exert musculoskeletal force” (he’s spe
aking carefully now, reading from his computer screen), “given existing constraints stemming from: Structural, Anatomical, Physiological, Biochemical, Psychoneural/Psychosocial, External and Environmental factors.”

  “Is that all?” I ask, like a smart-guy, standing there in the shadow of 500 pounds, but Hatfield either doesn’t hear me or ignores me.

  “I cataloged 35 or 40 different factors which must be accounted for to truly maximize strength,” he explains. “I used eight different ranking technologies . . . and applied multiple factor analyses . . . in the statistical sense of the word.”

  His computer beeps and whistles.

  “Significant factors affecting a squat include muscle fiber arrangement—musculoskeletal leverage—freedom of movement between muscle fibers—sensitivity of glandular functions . . .”

  “This is very enlightening,” I tell him.

  Hatfield corrects me. “It’s revolutionary,” he says.

  “I considered each point along the ATP/ADP glycolytic pathway,” he says in a quieter voice—almost conspiratorial. “I made graphs of the various percentages of the energy-delivering processes over time—CP-splitting, ATP-splitting, oxidation, glycolysis . . . I thought,” Hatfield’s almost whispering, “how will I be able to exert maximum force and how can I augment that application? And that, my friend, is why I broke world records.